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I agree, but I feel that this is part of a bigger problem - bugs are not user-friendly, but sometimes bringing in user-friendly features - like the newer, more

by azernik 15y ago

I agree, but I feel that this is part of a bigger problem - bugs are not user-friendly, but sometimes bringing in user-friendly features - like the newer, more intuitive/well-rounded version of a package - introduced bugs, which are not helpful to the user at all. I don't feel that this is at all an artifact of distribution niches. Rather, this is a universal phenomenon of software engineering: every change (including bugfixes!) tends to introduce bugs. While bugfix changes usually (though, as many readers will know, not always) reduce the total bugginess of your product, most other changes tend to increase bugginess. So there's an inherent trade-off between on the one hand having a short development cycle, a good (for some definition of good) feature set and quick latency between the design and implementation stages, all of which can be used to make a product more user-friendly; and on the other hand having no bugs, which is also a big contributer to user-friendliness. tl;dr: Ubuntu's customized design and up-to-date packages are not orthogonal to its bugginess; Debian's years-long testing and integration process is not orthogonal to its years-old package selection.

jiggy2011 15y ago
I entirely agree, but I think having so many distributions exacerbates the problem because there is so much fragmentation in terms of stuff like testing and support documentation. If I have a problem with my Linux Mint install and find something related to fixing the problem in Debian there is a fair chance it will work, but then again there's a chance it doesn't. If the solution is written by a slackware user the chance that it will help is even smaller. Lack of bugs and issues is a huge part of the overall user experience. There seems to be a belief that making a shiny product that looks like something from apple will make it more friendly to users, this is fallacious. I think the original reason that the mac was perceived as being more user friendly was only partly down to it's UI and mainly down to the fact that Apple had a simpler and more focused idea about how their product should work and what it should do (controlling the hardware helps somewhat here) and therefor there was just less surface area for bugs. Linux has the problem of being a patchwork of software with different levels of quality put together by different people with different ideas about how things should be. Whilst this has it's merits it does lead to some problems which really have no right to be real problems.

by azernik 15y ago

jiggy2011 15y ago

I entirely agree, but I think having so many distributions exacerbates the problem because there is so much fragmentation in terms of stuff like testing and support documentation. If I have a problem with my Linux Mint install and find something related to fixing the problem in Debian there is a fair chance it will work, but then again there's a chance it doesn't. If the solution is written by a slackware user the chance that it will help is even smaller. Lack of bugs and issues is a huge part of the overall user experience. There seems to be a belief that making a shiny product that looks like something from apple will make it more friendly to users, this is fallacious. I think the original reason that the mac was perceived as being more user friendly was only partly down to it's UI and mainly down to the fact that Apple had a simpler and more focused idea about how their product should work and what it should do (controlling the hardware helps somewhat here) and therefor there was just less surface area for bugs. Linux has the problem of being a patchwork of software with different levels of quality put together by different people with different ideas about how things should be. Whilst this has it's merits it does lead to some problems which really have no right to be real problems.